Build Your Blog With MD Part 1: An Introduction & Philosophy

I’ve decided to create a post series here on Kolakube to teach you how to customize Marketers Delight with a WordPress Child Theme.

The benefits of using a Child Theme to customize your site is that you have full access to all the templates and files that make up Marketers Delight under-the-hood. This means you can change anything on your website.

Now, I know many of you are going to cringe at the idea of working with templates and files because this means you’ll be working with code.

Truthfully, coding isn’t as big of a nightmare as many software companies market it to you as. From years of selling themes, I’ve learned how my customers like to customize their sites and built Marketers Delight in a way that is familiar to experienced developers and easy to pick up for beginners.

If you invest just a few hours upfront leaning the guts of Marketers Delight and how to use a Developer Tool like in Google Chrome (or other browsers), you’ll be able to make all kinds of changes to your website with ease.

You’ll be amazed at how far just a little coding knowledge will go. While tools like drag and drop page builders certainly can make things easier, the skills and knowledge you learn are non-transferrable.

If you learn code, you’ll find that you can bring your experience anywhere regardless of how the website is built. Think of it as a one-time investment that goes towards learning the true language websites speak.

That language is not drag and drop, it’s code. The goal of this series is to show you that MD makes coding websites with WordPress easy for anybody to understand.

While MD has everything you need out of the box to create a beautiful blog and setup email signup forms, changing how anything looks or works does require code. If coding to make changes to your site just really isn’t something you can do, then MD may not be for you right now.

Who am I to make these claims about coding?

I’ve been building websites for a long time and quickly found that I could never find a tool that I was truly satisfied with out of the box. I even use Marketers Delight here on Kolakube and I still saw things I wanted to change! So I made some tweaks of my own.

You’ll most likely find that to be the case too. The goal of a product like MD is to provide you a with focused solution. I can build features I know you need, but you’re the only one who knows what they should look like on your website.

I learned this for myself after spending hours tweaking the typography, spacing, fonts, and other design elements on all of my websites. I never found something that took perfect care of those things to my own liking and grew tired of doing this over and over again when all I wanted to do was write.

Now that I have MD, I don’t have to worry about those meticulous details (and neither do you!). Keep in mind that despite the fact that I build MD and other products the reason I’m here is to write, just like you.

See, I’ve spent thousands of hours formulating my own development theories and writing and rewriting code to find the simplest answers to common problems I’d run into during the customization process.

On the outside, MD is a tool built to my preferences of how websites I create to share my art and create an income should be built. Under-the-hood are coding techniques I use to make customizations as easy and fast as possible.

I won’t only show you code, but I’ll help you understand the thought process behind it. See, coding isn’t all about syntax but also logical problem-solving. If you can think logically, then you can code.

A Quick Course Overview

Here are the topics that I’ll cover in these series. Each item will be a separate blog post:

Depending on how you guys like these posts, I’ll be doing more teaching tutorials to help you better understand the inner workings of Marketers Delight.

See you soon with the first issue in this series. If you want to be alerted of the next issue, join the free email list and I’ll send it right to you.

What do you want to know?

Leave a comment below and let me know if there's been a change you wanted to make to your website but didn't know how to. Whether it's something simple like changing your site's font or more advanced like adding content below your header, I'll do my best to address it in this series.

Hmm… Making the front landing page really clear on what you DO for your clients so they can get plugged in fast. (And classy.

What specifically to put into your front landing page to make it SEO top notch. Key words I know but where?

How to make site fast loaded. I have a bunch of plugins that I am sure am slowing it down. What to do about that? And what you recommend for this theme.

Please use video’s when you train, it’s so much easier to follow for us new beginners. Lastly, if I could be so bold here, some examples of what we could do from sites that already use this theme. It would be nice if they could share what has worked for them to drive traffic and what hasn’t. If that’s not enough to get you started, I can give you 10 more ideas just email me:)

Looking forward to the Child Theme post…..I am trying to change footer and navigation menu colors. I know exactly what CSS to change and tested it in the MD4 files (I changed them back), but I must be missing something because nothing I do in the child theme has the same results.

Hmm, do you have a link to the site you can email to me so I can take a look? In case you haven’t already, make sure you activated the child theme in the Themes panel and that it’s the current active theme on your site.

One last question for the night….how do I change the link color for the Main Menu.

I figured out to change the color for the menu by adding color: to .menu-main .menu-item:not(.button) .menu-item-title. But I if I make them #ffffff, then the current page is also white. How do I change the color of current page link in the menu?

I’m trying to create a completely custom homepage to use via a page template. However, when I add the page template to the child’s theme, select in in the page editor and publish it, all I see is a completely white page. Why doesn’t a page template work like it usually does?

Never mind….it was one of those stupid syntax errors where I was leaving something out. It is working now. I am really liking this theme and think it will be easier to customize as you add to the guide and release the funnels and other additions.

Very good info here, Alex. I suggest you do a video series for people who are “visual learners”. You can surely help a lot of people with the things you know about website building and I can tell that your passionate about doing so!

Wanted to know how to use Infusionsoft optin forms and also how to set up and manipulate the open graph tags for each page… like if I wanted to build a sales funnel using this software and wanted custom tags for each page. (A simple plugin like yoast doesn’t do that).

How would I create an Action Box like what CP did with the Effectus skin for thesis?

Until I build in direct Infusionsoft support, you can place custom email forms onto all your posts/pages using the Email Forms system built into MD.

As for your second question, I’m working on releasing Page Leads which will allow you to add email signup forms and other kinds of boxes (pricing tables, funnel boxes, etc.) to various parts of your layout. I’m hoping to release this soon and it will integrate perfectly into an existing MD site.

For now, you can create custom action boxes at the end of all your posts/pages (see this post for example of a basic one).